WOW - it's more than 2 weeks old, but I still want to talk about it. In brief Amazon runs a site called mechanical turk, which is a side where people can go and get paid to do stuff that computers can't do. They get a small ammount of money for each task they do. He finds out that an employee at Belkin has posted a task that is called "write a positive 5/5 review for product on website" - for a belkin router that has consistently gotten bad reviews. wow. I really hope this is not going to be a standard way of doing business.
Anyway the president of Belkin answers and says he's sorry.
Which is great.
But what I also think is great is that they apologize, acknowledge that they messed up and actually say that "belkin will work earnestly to regain the thrust we have lost."
I mean they are very aware that this could blow up in their face, and they know that where they will be hit, is on their branding and trust. If people don't trust a company like belkin, there's probably close to 1000 other companies that could supply the same kind of products. So the statement from the president shows that they actually know that they're in too deep if they don't act, and that they will work on regaining thrust from their customers. bravo.
[belkin, users, reviews, trust]
[0 comments]
Since friday the 30. of January the place where I have choosen to store all my bookmarks has been down. According to their Twitter account, ma.gnolia.com had severe failure. Which was okay for a day or two, but by now Im kinda wondering if I will ever see what I think is about 3 years of bookmarks again. Im pretty pissed about that to say the least. I have even wondered to myself "why oh why I have ever putted my bookmarks on the internet" - and "why oh why I didn't stay on del.icio.us".
Ma.gnolia had a lot of charm for me, and where a really interesting tool to use for open knowledge sharing within a company.
I am using my bookmarks everyday for research and benchmarking and best casestudies. I don't know if I will be able to access my "knowledge bank of expertise goods" which used to be my magnolia account.
They lost it - or so it seems.
I trusted their service so much - and I also thought that they had really great backup of our data, but I guess not.
Now in my current mood of "pissed off ness" I am sure that they have brought miscredit to all of the internet - from my point of view because I don't believe I will be able to trust an online service again - not without having it all backed up at home.
If I face it, there's a lot of those bookmarks that are not that important (a lot of them are - but probably 70 % I could live without).
But I would never be able to use ma.gnolia again - also because of their way of communicating to their users - which has almost non-existent. The value in my bookmarks is extremely high. I wanted to know the day after the failure that I would probably not see my bookmarks again.
Bottomline is: I wont be able to trust the internet with my data without having most of it backup at home. I can't believe that they could loose my data. I don't think my trust in social network and services will ever be regained. At least not in services where I store data that is actually that valuable to my work and my daily life.
[magnolia, ma.gnolia.com, bookmarks, data, trust, security, communication, badwill]
[6 comments]